Resurrecting Matilda Joslyn Gage: “The Woman Who Was Ahead of the Women Who Were Ahead of Their Time”

That pithy subtitle comes from the website of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation (matildajoslyngage.org). It’s too good not to share. If Robert Green Ingersoll is the most remarkable American most people never heard of, Matilda Joslyn Gage is his female equivalent.

Had you asked me just two years ago for a recitation of the most influential American women in the fight for woman’s suffrage, I would have instantly named Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, Victoria Woodhull, and perhaps a few others if my memory had been jogged. But one name I would not have known is Gage’s.

Yet by any measure, Gage is as significant as those famed crusaders whose names come straight to mind.